Electronic mail or “E-mail” is a store and forward method of sending and receiving messages over an electronic communication system, and is typically perceived as an infrastructure connecting people through a human interface means at both ends. E-mail messages may contain text, files, and even images. But what if an e-mail user desired to “pull” rather than “push” information from another computer?
The existing e-mail infrastructure provides a foundation to expand upon beyond the traditional uses of e-mail systems. Applying automation and intelligence that would allow e-mail messages to contain data opposed to just message text, is an open and challenging problem in support of data sharing and information collection needs which the prior art has not adequately addressed.
Referring to FIG. 1, before the widespread use of the internet, there were attempts to use e-mail to access the internet. These methods provided a text only representation of a webpage that was delivered in an e-mail message (see). To enter data back into any form fields, the user had to find where to enter the information, send the request back to the webpage to retrieve the results, and then view the results. That required, to do an internet search, or get a weather forecast, the user would first have to have the page e-mailed to them, then determine how to enter the data in the returned page, send the message back, and decipher the results.
Still referring to FIG. 1, one problem with this prior art method of accessing the internet over e-mail is that the process becomes confusing to the user who is requesting information. A second problem is that the domains are not data specific. That means if a particular piece of information is needed from a particular source that is known, it is desirable to retrieve the data directly from that source. A third lies in the fact that the results are formatted based on the provider, not the requestor. Therefore, when sending a request, the results are returned in a format that may not format well in an e-mail message.
In light of the aforementioned deficiencies in the prior art, it would therefore be desirable to transform the data into a format that would appear legible in an e-mail message. Lastly, there are no specific ways to upload or submit information directly into specific sources. It would be desirable to not only request information from a particular source, but to contribute as well. To date, the prior art has not addressed this need in this manner.